Development of a Social Network for Research Support and Individual Well-being Improvement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new social network platform combining social dynamics, forum features, and gamification to facilitate research on psychological and social phenomena, addressing data access limitations of existing OSNs.

Contribution

It presents a novel platform that integrates social network dynamics with forum and gamification features to support research on social and individual well-being.

Findings

Platform enables access to social interaction data for research.

Facilitates studies on psychological and social phenomena.

Supports development of computational methods for well-being analysis.

Abstract

The ways of communication and social interactions are changing. Web users are becoming increasingly engaged with Online Social Networks (OSN), which has a significant impact on the relationship mechanisms between individuals and communities. Most OSN platforms have strict policies regarding data access, harming its usage in psychological and social phenomena studies, It is also impacting the development of computational methods to evaluate and improve social and individual well-being via the web. Aiming to fill this gap, we propose a platform that brings together social networks dynamics with forum features, altogether with gamification elements, targeting researchers interested in obtaining access to user's data to study psychological and social phenomena.